Xinhua has the story of a selfless doctor who rushed to her fellow doctor's aid, forgetting she was naked:

The doctor, surnamed Tang, heard her neighbor Doctor Chen scream in a next-door bathroom at about 11 p.m. Sunday when she was having a bath in her clinic’s dormitory building in Pingshan Subdistrict, Longgang. She thought Chen must be in danger after he did not respond when she called out for him.

Tang rushed out of the bathroom in such a hurry that she forgot to put on clothes. After the security guards broke the door, she found Chen lying unconscious and stopping breathing with the shower head in his hand.

Tang asked security guards to cut off the electricity and began artificial respiration on Chen. Chen’s heart began to beat again about five minutes later.

Link. Okay, I don't mean to be critical and suspicious of a good deed, but . . . well, that's exactly what I'm doing. Let's imagine that the story is a little different. Let's imagine that Doctor Tang was schtupping Doctor Chen in his dorm room, and that she didn't want anyone to know about it. They were both naked, and he takes a shower and ends up injured. She saves him, still nude, but by that time other help has arrived and she has to explain her presence. So she explains that she, too, was taking a shower and ran naked to save her friend.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Since Mrs. Good Reverend is enthralled with everything Seattle and especially the Mariners, I know she'll enjoy hearing about what happened to M's reliever Matt Thornton in the San Diego visitor's bullpen over the weekend:

Seattle relievers were dismayed to find out when they got here that the beautiful, still-new Petco Park does not have a bathroom in the visitors' bullpen, which is down the right-field line, on the opposite side of the field from the visitors' bench.

No one was more dismayed than lefty Matt Thornton, who had go to the bathroom during the game Friday night. To do so, he had to climb over a fence to reach a public restroom, where he had to stand in line.

"I met a guy named Stan, who invented a baseball cap with a handle so you can take it off fast to catch foul balls," Thornton said. "He said he tested it at a batting cage on pitches at 75 mph and caught five before the seams started to give out."

This article from news.com.au about recent successful efforts to reanimate dogs who have been clinically dead for hours unfortunately leaves out a few of the details, which I have taken the liberty of supplying:

Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

[The animals are then taken to be buried in the pet cemetary. However, rather than stopping there, the scientists go beyond the pet cemetary into the ancient burial ground of the Micmac Indians. Animals buried there have been known to come back to life.]

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

[Though the dogs were jovial before their death, they seem to be "a little dead" after the resurrection. They are surly and unpleasant.]

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.

However rather than sending people to sleep for years, then bringing them back to life to benefit from medical advances, the boffins would be happy to keep people in this state for just a few hours.

[After the people return from the Indian burial ground, scientists expect that they will go on a murderous rampage, slicing Achilles tendons with scalpels, before ultimately being put down by the father that loved them so very much.]

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Well, travel out of the country for two weeks and what do you miss? Only the final answer to the most notorious political mystery of the past half-century. I just can't believe it was a felt marker all along.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

Today Mrs. Good Reverend and I drove out to the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum for some walking and communing with nature. We walked alongside red-winged blackbirds, blue herons, hares, and turtles. I could count the people we saw there on, like, one and a half hands. Even in ninety-degree heat, the place was awesome, beautiful, peaceful--in a word, fantastic. And best of all, it was free. It would be a bargain at twice the price. I'm not sure why more Philadelphians don't spend their weekends there. But don't tell anyone I said that.

Adults and teenagers have a strange relationship, to say the least. When teenagers express anything having to do with sexuality, adults flip out. Why? Adults are neurotic. We have our own sexual demons, many of which developed when we were teenagers. We loon on teenagers as simultaneously children, too young and innocent to be corrupted by sex; and sexual beings, strapping young lads like the lawnboy on Desperate Housewives and winsome girls like Lindsay Lohan. It freaks adults out to firmly believe that young people's sexuality is not okay while at the same time lusting over them. And we develop this complex when we are teenagers, simultaneously lusted and freaked out over.

It's not surprising, then, that teenagers are wont to push some boundaries, nor that adults are wont to overreact. That pretty much sums up what happened in Wisconsin last month, when a high school senior boy was suspended for wearing a dress to prom:

"I looked like Marilyn Monroe," [Kerry Lofy] says.

Lofy picked up [gay friend Victor] Anderson, they exchanged flowers - a pink-and-white wrist corsage for Lofy, and a boutonniere for Anderson - and then dined at the Newport Grill with three other couples. Lofy ordered beef tenderloin while Anderson had smoked salmon. They posed for photos just like the rest of the prom-goers. Then they went to the dance.

But when the 6-foot, 185-pound Lofy showed up in a dress, he was turned away by teachers, he said.

He went back to his car, put a tan-and-black plaid leisure suit over the dress and was allowed inside. Once inside, Lofy shed the leisure suit during a dance-off.

That's when the school's security guard escorted him to the door.

Lofy says that when he showed up at school on Monday, the school liaison police officer issued the $249 disorderly conduct ticket.

Link. This sounds exactly like the type of stunt I would have pulled in high school. I never got suspended, though. Did get pursued by a police search helicopter (see profile), but certainly not suspended. While it is ridiculous that Lofy got punished so severely for something so benign, the absurdity is nothing compared to Oregon middle-schooler Cazz Altomare, who got detention for hugging her boyfriend:

[A]ll the attention has caught Bend off guard. One reason is that no explicit ban on "lingering hugging" exists. Like many schools across the country, the Bend-La Pine school district refers to public displays of affection generally in its student guidelines, including the instructions: "Hugging, holding hands, walking arm-in-arm, kissing, and other public displays of affection are not appropriate for middle school. Quick hello and goodbye hugs are OK." (A hugging ban does exist at the La Pine middle school just south of Bend, where no complaints have been filed.). . . .It's essential, Dr. Horner adds, to remember that kids in the US come from a wide variety of backgrounds, with very different ideas about "appropriate" behavior. Laurie Gould, spokeswoman for the Bend-La Pine school district, says most Bend natives are unperturbed by the rule. The accusing family, she points out, is "not from around here."

Link. Beyond punishing teenagers for the sexuality and affection they express, from the jokey to the genuine, adults judge teenagers' character based on image ideals we hold that are not without sexual overtones. Even that staid stallwart of American tolerance, Abercrombie & Fitch, is not above overt discrimination based on teenagers' appearance. Just ask Livermore high schoolers Shannon Nichols and Sarah Adams:

Since Abercrombie would probably jump at the chance to hire the preppy-looking Nichols, she decided to test their tolerance for someone dressed as a goth. She sprayed her sandy brown hair black, layered on the heavy black eyeliner, added a fake lip ring and bared her jeweled navel.

Nichols' Anglo poster girl pal Adams, 18, is a blue-eyed blond who looks like she just stepped out of an Abercrombie ad.

. . . .

"The most dramatic was how the Abercrombie employees treated Sarah in comparison to how they treated me," Nichols says. "As soon as she walked in, the cashier started talking to her and told her she could meet with the manager."

Adams explained that she had no retail experience, and really no job experience. That didn't matter, she was assured by a young man identifying himself as the store manager. In fact, she didn't even have to fill out a job application, she just needed to come to a group interview being held in the next two weeks.

"I waited in line to ask the cashier if I could fill out an application, and she tried to not even acknowledge I was there," Nichols says. "When it was my turn, she actually turned to the man behind me and asked if she could help him. He told her that I was first."

Nichols, putting on her best manners, politely asked for an application and told the cashier that she had a lot of retail experience and excellent references.

She was directed to an electronic station set up to take applications.

In actuality, these two could be twins:

Even their names, Shannon Nichols and Sarah Adams, sound like they were thought up by an uninventive screenwriter to label two characters who are essentially the same. At least they learned a life lesson early: in business, it's not what you know or even who you know, but how bigoted the other guy is.

Friday, June 24, 2005

The baby is crying, she doesn't want food, her diaper is clean, Mommy's not around, and you, Dad, seem to have misplaced the pacifier. Pop quiz, hotshot: what do you do? Well, according to the Times of London, even if you're a man, you can offer up a nipple:

Aka Pygmies, a hunter-gatherer tribe from the northern Congo, a[re] the best fathers. When the mother is not available, the father calms his baby by giving him or her a nipple to suck.. . . .

Caroline Flint, the former president of the Royal College of Midwives, said that she had come across many examples of men in Britain “suckling” their babies, even though it might not be something they talked about very much.

She said: “It’s not a case of the man saying to the baby, ‘Here you are, have my booby’, but usually of the baby snuffling along the father’s chest, finding the nipple and sucking. The men are usually very surprised, but the babies seem content.”

Link. If the idea of man-nursing doesn't appeal to you, perhaps you'd like to think about the male period, or, as I like to call it, man-struation. A teenager in India is going through that special time in a young person's life:

"If tests of blood samples prove the presence of ovum, this would be a very rare medical case," he added.

Tarak, the boy who was identified by only one name, works as a domestic help in Kalna town, some 200 km north of Kolkata.

He began 'menstruating' more than a year ago, but hid the fact from his employers and his impoverished family for the fear of losing his job.

Doctors, who say this is a very rare case but not unprecedented, are now planning chromosomal and hormonal tests on the boy.

"The presence of female functional endometrial in a male prostrate gland can cause this type of anomaly," said Pradip Mitra of the West Bengal Gynaecological Society.

Link. Well that leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Foremost in my mind is "how?"

Thursday, June 23, 2005

as per an agreement with one lucky winner, known only as Zee Wyatt, who forked over $10.50 for the honor. What does it mean? I like to think there's a little SuedO Apmuza in all of us. Or at least there's a little me living in SuedO Apmuza.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

The science-fiction genre is often preoccupied with the notion of the future, primarily because, in the future, things will have advanced in one direction or another and anything will be possible. For decades, filmmakers have been creating movies that are set in the near future and offer up predicitions about what advances our society will have undergone. Now, however, we can look upon such films of the future as films of the past, which, even though in their own present they seemed futuristic, managed to leave off some future developments that we in the present can look on as past. Now what was their present's future is our present's past, or at least very near future, so clearly we have some perspective on the issue. I just hope this doesn't unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum.

"Future" Year

Film

Prediction

Stuff They Missed

1984

1984

The "Ministry of Truth" broadcasts propaganda.

All government departments broadcast propaganda.

1984

1984

Thought Police monitor everyone to eliminate thoughtcrime.

They can also look at your library records.

1996

Demolition Man

Convicts are held in cryo-prisons.

Convicts are held in over-crowded prisons.

1997

Terminator 2

Three billion lives are lost on "Judgment Day."

Millions of viewers waste their lives watching "Judge Judy."

20th Cent.

Brazil

Characters have fantasies to the tune of "Brazil."

No one had "Achy Breaky Heart" stuck in their heads.

20th Cent.

Brazil

The government is constantly arresting and torturing the wrong people, but won't admit it.

Herve Villechaise, well known for repeatedly shouting "the plane!" when portraying Tattoo on Fantasy Island, liked to be called "midget." Most other contemporary actors of small stature despise the term. At best, calling people midgets implies that you think of them as that certain type of human being, as one would think of a Serbian or a shoemaker--they are defined by their type and not their set of human complexities. At worst, calling people midgets implies that, intellectually as well as physically, look down on them. One actor who dislikes the term is Danny Woodburn, who is probably most famous, at least in my mind, for playing Kramer's friend Mickey on Seinfeld (Mickey: "Bacterial Meningitis, Jackpot!!" Kramer: "Gonorrhea?!! You wanna trade?" Mickey: "Sorry buddy, this is the Hamlet of diseases. Severe pain, nausea, delusions, it's got everything!").

Danny Woodburn was apparently also in Death to Smoochy, which I didn't see because I heard it was bad. Roger Ebert reviewed that movie and used the m-word to refer to Woodburn, prompting Woodburn to write in to complain. What followed was an interesting correspondence about offensiveness, the press, and the power of language to wound:

The truth is Little People or Persons of Short Stature or Dwarfs do nothave equal rights under the law. We are forbidden to join the military or police force based purely on size and not ability. Accessibility laws laid down by the ADA are not always accommodating to Little People. The ACLU, has not, in my experience acknowledged such issues as forcible eviction, denial of housing, or employment and education when it comes to people with Dwarfism. The response was "We don't recognize that there is any such race as the Dwarf race." True though it may be, in my opinion there needs to be a precedent set in support of Little People.

With regard to the term Little People, I suppose that until we can get the world at large not to describe someone as black or Jewish or disabled or Asian or Hispanic when we talk of their existence, we must include the term "People" in order to keep them in the one race that we all share -- the human race.

I suppose it is more than you expected after your note to me, but it issomething that I have great passion about and have spoken publicly at every opportunity and it is the reason I pursue acting as passionately as I do.

Link to original Movie Answer Man column, link to full correspondence. Ebert, who writes for a living, and Woodburn, who performs, both have much to say about the way words bear loads of emotion and association. The letters are thought-provoking reading, right down to the smile-inducing last word. It's a good thing Ebert or Villechaise didn't see the lifts in Woodburn's shoes. Then they'd know he's been heightening.

One of the major reasons I haven't posted very much for the past, oh, four weeks is that I was out of the country for a good portion of the time, visiting, among other places, Romania. Mrs. Good Reverend and I took the train into Sighisoara, a small town in Transylvania, before continuing on to Bucharest. Sighisoara was the most refreshing point on our journey--an old countryside village build around a brightly colored, cobblestoned medieval citadel. We enjoyed partaking of local cuisine at cafes and hiking into the surrounding hillside before returning to our centuries-old hostel in the center of the citadel. A block away lay Casa Vlad Dracul, the home of "The Dragon," whose son, Vlad Tepes, came to be known as Dracula. Though he didn't drink blood so much, Little Vlad grew up to be a tyrannical ruler of Transylvania and gain another alias: Vlad the Impaler. They called him that because of his habit of punishing enemies by setting them anus-first on the top of a tall pike. One's bodyweight would pull him down the pike, which would work its way around and through various internal tissues until one died, two days later, from a combination of blood loss, dehydration, exposure, infection, and trauma to vital organs. Oh joyous holiday!

In Bucharest, Romania's capital, we saw the government palace of Ceausescu, a dictator who ruled the nation before the people revolted and instituted democracy during the fall of the Iron Curtain. The palace, now home to the parliament but then ironically called "The People's Palace," is the second largest building in the world behind The Pentagon. In the 1980s, Ceausescu demolished hundreds of homes--an entire suburban sprall--to build the palace and the Champs-Elysee-style boulevard B-dul Unirii while spending 40% of his country's GDP on the palace's spectacular marbled, crystaled, carpeted, woodcarved opulence.

Now several recent news reports depict Romanians, almost all of whom have last names ending in -u, for some reason, as backwards, superstitious folk applying medieval logic to contemporary circumstances. On June 11 there was the story of the agriculture minister whose in-office accident (parts of the wall and/or ceiling fell on his head) prompted the department staff to call an exorcist:

Father Deheleanu used holy water, a crucifix and said a set of prayers to exorcise the spirits.

Chelmu said: "After a wall fell on top of ministry advisor Teodor Craciun, I decided enough was enough.

"We tried to work out why we were so unlucky, and realised no priest had stepped foot in this ministry for years - and the last government had not had a particularly close relationship with God."

Link (via Fark). Then there was the June 19 Observer story of Petre Toma, whose painful death marked the start of a string of bad luck that convinced his family he was haunting them:

'His own sister complained that her daughter-in-law had fallen ill and that Petre was to blame - she said he had become a strigoi and something must be done,' recalls Marinescu.

What six local men did was enact an ancient Romanian ritual for dealing with a strigoi - a restless spirit that returns to suck the lifeblood from his relatives. Just before midnight, they crept into the cemetery on the edge of the village and gathered around Toma's grave.

Then they dug him up, split his ribcage with a pitchfork, removed his heart, put stakes through the rest of his body and sprinkled it with garlic. Then they burnt the heart, put the embers in water and shared the grim cocktail with the sick woman. More than a year later, the effect of the macabre ritual still reverberates through the village: 'Well, the sick woman got better again, so they must have done something right,' says Anisoara Constantin, on what constitutes the village's main street.

Link (via Sploid). Ghosts or no ghosts, I certainly enjoyed Romania and its citizens, and I don't blame them for their quirky ways. If your country's two most famous leaders were Ceausescu and Vlad the Impaler, you just might believe in monsters too.

Get started:Combine the sugar, cocoa, milk, and butter in the saucepan. Cook it, stirring frequently, over medium heat on the stovetop until it gets to a rolling boil. This means the center is boiling and the outsides look foamy. Let it continue to boil for exactly one minute more. Then remove it from the heat.Next "fold in" the vanilla, peanut butter, and oats, stirring it until the peanut butter is melted in and the oats are all thoroughly spread throughout.

You're practically done already:Use the soup spoon to scoop out dollops of the weird mix and drop each one onto the wax paper. There should be about two dozen in all. When you're done, let them cool until they are solid enough to maintain their shape.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

I believe it was another famous Joe, Uncle Joey from Full House, who pointed out one great thing about hockey: if you hurt yourself, the ice is right there. As Joseph Cooper of Tucson found out, a similar logic applies to graveyards--as scenes of sudden death go, they are awfully convenient:

Dark clouds were building in the Tucson sky as Joseph Cooper closed his tailor shop for the day. He was intent on making one last stop before heading home and may not have heard the beginning rumblings of the thunderstorm as he drove down Grant Street.

As with every Saturday after work, Joseph, 70, was going to the place that gave him peace of mind, where he could lose himself in the past and pour out his heart. He turned into the East Lawn Palms Mortuary & Cemetery and followed the road's familiar curve, stopping at the grave of his thirdborn son.

. . . .

He was heading to his place of solace. There was no way to know it would be the place where he would lose his life. It was after 5 p.m., and storm clouds were moving across the cemetery. Joseph was standing beneath the tree where Oscar was buried, and it was there that a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, through the tree and into Joseph.

Link. I've thought of several possible epitaphs for my personal tombstone over the years, but one seems particularly appropriate:

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.?That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot.Say I'm working at N.S.A.Somebody puts a code on my desk,something nobody else can break.So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it.And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well.But maybe that code was the locationof some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East.Once they have that location,they bomb the village where the rebels were hidingand fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed.Now the politicians are sayin' "send in the marines to secure the area"'cause they don't give a shit.It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot.Just like it wasn't them when their number was called,'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard.It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass.And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work atgot exported to the country he just got back from.And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job,'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.Meanwhile my buddy from Southierealizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a governmentthat would sell us oil at a good price.And of course the oil companies used the skirmishto scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck.A cute little ancillary benefit for thembut it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon.And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back,and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipperwho likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs,and it ain't too long 'til he hits one,spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic.So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive,so he's got to walk to the job interviews,which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids.And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eatthe only blue plate special they're servin'is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.So what do I think?I'm holdin' out for somethin' better.Why not just shoot my buddy,take his job and give it to his sworn enemy,hike up gas prices,bomb a village,club a baby seal,hit the hash pipeand join the National Guard?I could be elected president.